Now that Donald Trump's been elected the next President of the United States, the fate of the Affordable Care Act is the No. 1 issue on the minds of most people keenly interested in the nation's health-care crisis. But observers emphasize there'll also be no shortage of other pressing medical and health matters on Trump's plate.

The online news publication STAT has identified five such issues and tried valiantly to make some sense of "the vagaries, reversals, and red herrings that have marked Trump's rhetoric." Read the full article here, but I'll list some excerpts below.

1. What's he going to do with the NIH?

The National Institutes of Health is still recovering from the deep cuts of sequestration in 2013, and China, paper tiger of many Trump talking points, is slated to outpace the U.S. in science and technology Research & Development spending this decade.

And yet Trump has said little of consequence about the issue. He told Scientific American that while "there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous."

How he would strike that balance remains a mystery.

STAT notes that Trump is close to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who last year called on Congress to double the NIH's budget. But he also told a conservative talk radio host last year that it'd be great to bring common sense to the agency "because I hear so much about the NIH and it's terrible."

2. What becomes of the Obama-era medical projects?

The BRAIN Initiative, the Precision Medicine Initiative, the cancer "moonshot" — President Barack Obama made the world of science a major focus of his second term. But it's unclear whether those projects will have a champion in the White House over the next four years.

STAT quotes Greg Simon, head of the moonshot project, expressing optimism because in 31 years in Washington he's never been associated with a program with more bipartisan support. But the online publication says it's an unknown whether Trump will side with Republicans who've advocated for federal investment in scientific research or the House Freedom Caucus, a populist group calling for federal spending across the board.

3. How will he address the opioid crisis?

Trump spent much of the campaign saying his long-promised wall on the southern border would stem the flow of illegal drugs into the US. He expanded on that a bit last month, promising to crack down on prescription drug abuse while offering help to those struggling with addiction.

But Trump's plan was characteristically light on detail, STAT notes, promising to incentivize states to handle the issue but offering no explanation how. He called on the FDA to speed up the review of new painkillers meant to deter abuse, which would require the intervention of Congress; and he promised to increase the number of patients doctors can treat for opioid addiction, which the Obama administration has already done.

All the while, the number of US deaths from opioid overdose has roughly quadrupled since 1999, reaching a record of more than 28,000 in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem is especially desperate in the rural corners of the Rust Belt, where Trump support proved strong on Tuesday.

4. Who's going to run Health and Human Services?

The coming weeks will be consumed by speculation about the makeup of a Trump cabinet, which is reportedly going to be heavy on private-sector membership. Of key importance to the world of science and medicine is Health and Human Services, which presides over the FDA, the NIH, the CDC, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, among other agencies.

STAT names three potential candidates to head HHS: Dr. Ben Carson, who's assailed the Affordable Care Act, called for the overturning of Roe v. Wade and disputed the theory of evolution; Gingrich, a friend of the drug industry who has also crusaded for broader research into Alzheimer's and dementia; and Rich Bagger, a longtime biopharma exec who took a leave of absence from his role at biotech giant Celgene to serve as executive director of the Trump transition team under his friend New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

5. And what about drug pricing?

STAT notes that Biopharma stocks rallied Tuesday because Trump is widely perceived to be less hawkish on the issue of drug prices than his opponent. One poll found that 80 percent of equity investors expect major pricing reform to be effectively off the table in a Trump presidency.

But that assumes the sort of business-as-usual Republican administration that values free markets and shies away from imposing new regulations on industry. Trump rides into office with a populist message that might make dyed-in-the-wool fiscal conservatives nervous, and parsing his admittedly sparse statements on the issue paints a murkier picture for the drug industry. He has called for Medicare to be able to negotiate directly with drug companies on price and has argued for allowing drugs to be imported from other countries, two ideas well outside Republican dogma.

Todd Ackerman is a veteran reporter who has covered medicine for the Houston Chronicle since 2001. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, he previously worked for the Raleigh News & Observer, the National Catholic Register, the Los Angeles Downtown News and the San Clemente Sun-Post.